"and there was this feeling there—this overwhelming feeling of anticipated joy and unfettered possibility—that is still palpable in my consciousness. the feeling of good things—unknown and unmentionable yet vaguely familiar—to come. life, in all its glory, sprawled out in front of me in a moment." - shelley mcconkie

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

"Grace is when you aren't striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that's left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you're loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life. Another word for grace is gift."

"To judge someone before understanding that person is a form of human rejection and feeds upon itself. It intensifies personal insecurities, necessitating more judgment (prejudice) and less understanding. The processes continue in this vicious cycle."

Sunday, February 26, 2017

"...once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations."

"By synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness, they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make Love. How then are we to have this transcendent living whole conveyed into our souls? We brace our wills to secure it. We try to copy those who have it. We lay down rules about it. we watch. We pray. But these things alone will not bring Love into our nature. Love is an effect And only as we fulfill the right condition can we have the effect produced. Shall I tell you what the cause is?

Sunday, February 5, 2017

"Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor credit cards, they find parking spaces. They marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the Earth, the Earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It's serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. That's what I write. What it really is like. I'm just telling a very simple story."

"There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you're miles away from the neon lights of the city, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you you."

"these fragments i have shored against my ruins."

"for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am now."

-1 Corinthians 13:12

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever by ugly…if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

--Roald Dahl

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows.The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

--Hemingway

"A kind of light spread out from her. and everything changed color. And the world opened out. and a day was good to awaken to. and there were no limits to anything. and the people of the world were good and handsome. and i was not afraid anymore."

--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

To love. to be loved. to never forget your own insignificance. to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. to seek joy in the saddest places. to pursue beauty to its lair to never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch To try and understand. to never look away. and never, never to forget."

--Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

"Tell me what's the difference between hope and waiting because my heart doesn't know it constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting

it constantly gets lost in the fog of hope."

--Anna Kamienska

"It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you can say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tongue, half colours, too many."

--Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

"If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

--Junot Diaz

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea."

--Isak Dinesen(psuedonym of Baroness Karen Blixen, Out of Africa)

"I also painted a study of a seascape, nothing but a bit of sand, sea, sky, grey and lonely- sometimes I feel a need for that silence- where there's nothing but the grey sea- with an occasional seabird. But otherwise, no other voice than the murmer of the waves."

--Vincent van Gogh, from letter to his brother Theo, 17 Sept. 1882

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”